Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

The hunger of the spirit for eternity - as fierce as a starving man's for bread - is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.